Rating practice team 20

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Welcome to the newest round of practice teams. If you're an aspiring rater, then these will hopefully allow you to pick up on and address any problems with your rating, as well as providing you with experience rating teams that have been specifically made to be as tough to rate as possible, and to make you think creatively in order to find the best changes. Any rates we receive will be replied to with personalized feedback by one of harsha2014, Jirachi, Remedy, tab, and Trinitrotoluene. Then, at the end of the round, we'll give some general hints and feedback on how things went, and post the best rate that we received as an example of how to rate the team.

Anyone is welcome to participate and send in their rate, and everyone will be guaranteed to receive feedback appropriate to the effort they put into their rate, regardless of their ability. However, to keep things fair we won't be considering rates sent in by official team raters as winners of the best rate.

If you would like to participate in this round, PM your rate to tab no later than Friday November 8th.

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This week's team is based around a very simple idea: get hazards up, survive long enough for the more powerful members of the team to weaken stuff, and let mew clean up.

Skarmory @ Leftovers
Ability: Sturdy
EVs: 252 Def / 248 HP / 8 SDef
Impish Nature
- Brave Bird
- Spikes
- Whirlwind
- Roost
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Skarmory's a strong physical wall that takes plenty of hits, as well as providing a steel type. It's also important for setting up Spikes, which the team is very reliant on.

Terrakion @ Focus Sash
Ability: Justified
EVs: 252 Spd / 252 Atk / 4 SDef
Jolly Nature
- Close Combat
- Stone Edge
- Stealth Rock
- Taunt
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Following on from the idea of needing hazards fast, Terrakion is a solid lead for getting up SR early, while still being offensively threatening.

Mew @ Leftovers
Ability: Synchronize
EVs: 32 Spd / 176 HP / 148 SAtk / 152 Def
Modest Nature
- Psyshock
- Will-O-Wisp
- Calm Mind
- Softboiled
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This is an unusual choice of set, but the idea is that along with Spikes, WoW+CM will be able to cripple all of the usual ways of checking something like this.

Dragonite @ Choice Band
Ability: Multiscale
EVs: 252 Atk / 252 Spd / 4 SDef
Adamant Nature
- Outrage
- Fire Punch
- Earthquake
- Extreme Speed
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CBNite gives a solid check to sun teams, as well as a wallbreaker and general answer to fast sweepers with Extremespeed.

Tyranitar @ Choice Band
Ability: Sand Stream
EVs: 252 Atk / 4 SDef / 252 Spd
Jolly Nature
- Crunch
- Pursuit
- Stone Edge
- Superpower
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Spinners are a pain for a team like this; fast CBTar is great at taking them out along with annoying pokemon like Jellicent. It also gives the team a second wallbreaker.

Rotom-Wash @ Leftovers
Ability: Levitate
EVs: 252 SDef / 248 HP / 8 Spd
Calm Nature
- Volt Switch
- Hydro Pump
- Will-O-Wisp
- Pain Split​

The team was pretty horribly weak to water moves, so I've added a specially defensive Rotom-W to check water types and add a second source of burn.

 

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Thanks to everyone who sent in a rate this round. If you haven't already had one, you should be getting a reply in the next few days.

The best rate I received this round was by Halcyon. - he picked up on most of the main problems with the team and addressed them in a sensible and effective way, so good job Halcyon! Here's his rate:

On the whole, i think this team is pretty solid in that it has a clear goal in mind: set up hazards, pound away at the opponent with Banded Dragonite, Banded Tyranitar and Terrakion, and finally clean up with Mew. However, I think there are a few ways to change the setup of your team to make this goal easier to accomplish. The first problem I see, which you seem to have identified yourself is that your team is susceptible to powerful Water type attackers, Keldeo being the main culprit. Second, your team has great hazard setters and seems to rely on these hazards, but you have no way of blocking spinners from getting rid of them, meaning a simple thing like Forretress coming in on Choice-locked Dragonite can mean the end of your hazards. Finally, the choice of Mew as a cleaner seems odd to me, as it isn't a very powerful Pokémon and doesn't seem to bring much to the team in terms of synergy.

With that said, I think a good change to the team would be to use Jellicent over Rotom-W. Jellicent and Rotom-W both provide a needed Water resist, while Jellicent also acts as a spin blocker for the team. This means that Pokémon like Forretress come in on one of your choice-locked Pokémon for free and spin them away. Additionally, Jellicent is basically a full stop to Keldeo outside of Choice Specs HP Ghost, which the rest of the team can handle well enough. Analytic Starmie might seem like an issue, as it can beat Jellicent, but that brings me to my next suggestion. Use Scarf Tyranitar over Band. Even if Starmie KOs Jellicent, Tyranitar can simply come in with a Choice Scarf and KO Starmie with Pursuit before it has a chance to spin away hazards. This practically guarantees that your hazards will be on the field for the entire match. The last suggestion is to change Mew to a CM Latias. Latias is simply a better Calm Mind user than Mew is, being both faster and more powerful. It also has more special bulk and a Dragon typing which should also help with your Water weakness. Latias's speed should definitely come in handy in the late game when it's trying to sweep, as Mew would have problems with faster physical that Latias can simply outspeed and KO after a boost or two. As for Will-O-Wisp, Jellicent should be enough when it comes to spreading burn with Scald and Will-O-Wisp.

Anyway, I hope I was able to help! Good luck with the team!

Sets

Jellicent @ Leftovers
Ability: Water Absorb
EVs: 208 SDef / 252 HP / 4 SAtk / 44 Spd
Calm Nature
- Scald
- Will-O-Wisp / Toxic
- Recover
- Taunt / Ice Beam

Tyranitar (F) @ Choice Scarf
Ability: Sand Stream
EVs: 252 Spd / 252 Atk / 4 SAtk
Hasty / Adamant Nature
- Pursuit
- Stone Edge
- Crunch
- Ice Beam / Superpower

Latias (F) @ Leftovers
Ability: Levitate
EVs: 248 HP / 8 SAtk / 252 Spd
Timid Nature
- Calm Mind
- Substitute
- Dragon Pulse
- Recover

And here's some brief notes on how I'd personally go about rating the team and some of the main ideas behind it:

So the problem with this team is that what it claims to do and what it does don't really match up at all. If you look at things one at a time on paper and in isolation then it's just about OK as it can check a lot of things once. But if it tries to check a few, it's just going to get overwhelmed and probably 6-0ed. You could have gone pretty wild thinking of problems with the team - here are a few off the top of my head:

there's a lot of them

Rotom and Dragonite as the only water resists is terrible.
Easy to spin against, so using Spikes is dumb.
Easy to Spike against and lots of pokemon hate Spikes, so stall is a horrible matchup.
The only steel is entirely physically defensive and the Tyranitar is frail and non-scarfed, so special dragons (Latios/Latias) can have a field day.
Why would you ever use that Terrakion set on a team like this?
CBNite on a sand team with no spinner.
CB Terra wrecks shit pretty hard.
Any decent sun team should wreck it.
The Mew set is terrible in practice.
Nothing likes taking status of any kind really.
Kyurem-B gets subs easily and wrecks most of the team.
It's slow.
Alakazam wrecks it pretty hard.
Starmie too.
And Gengar.
Thundurus.
Tornadus.
Volcarona wrecks hard if we aren't playing on paper.
Good look killing a Skarmory without it making your life hell.
Forretress similarly.
And I could keep going.

That's a pretty intimidating list, but it's not too bad when you basically see that it struggles with: hazard related stuff (stopping spins and dealing with Spikes), water types, dragons and a few other things that can hopefully be dealt with during the process of fixing those. It also suffers a lot from terrible choices. Here's what I'd do:

-Dragonite is a stupid idea, as is that Terrakion set. Make Terrakion CB and replace Dragonite with a Rocky Helmet SR Garchomp. Two bad choices out of the way, and we've now got two pokemon that should never really get Spiked against and a way of making spinning harder.
-Mew set simply doesn't work. Use CM Latias or Reuniclus instead, they're just much better at it (and neither care about Spikes, note the common themes in suggestions).
-Scarf TTar to deal with Starmie, Gengar and Lati@s, as well as adding a bit of speed.

Changes that might work well but aren't vital to the rate:

-Maybe change Rotom; but a more robust water resist isn't necessary if using Latias. I'd personally change it to a physically defensive Gastrodon but not the biggest of deals and you don't want to make too many changes.
-SDef Skarmory is a possibility if you aren't comfortable relying so heavily on ScarfTar, but whatever. Both have their merits.

Now that XY is out, we're going to take a month or two off until the metagame settles down and we can start posting practice teams again. Hopefully you'll all still be interested in taking part in these once we start them up again!